Coast to Coast — From Western to Eastern Mexico in a Beater RV
Photo by Eric Anderson
The plan for that winter’s Mexico trip was to drive to Sayulita on the West Coast with our beater travel trailer for a month to visit and say our goodbyes to the friends we’d made, sans Tom and Sheila. We’d then head to the East Coast the quickest route to pick Isabelle up from the Cancun airport on New Year’s Day. This meant that we had to leave the West Coast the morning before Christmas, which was a good time to travel, because, after a night’s stop in Central Mexico at Patzcuaro, a lovely little lakeside city that had an RV Park we were familiar with, Mexico City, one of the most populous cities in the world, had to be traveled through. The best part was the fact that Christmas that year was on a Sunday, which would mean that traffic anywhere, especially Mexico City, would be practically nonexistent.
Instead of the many cop cars, we anticipated lurking about in the metropolis ready to stop us so that they could make a few bucks on trumped-up charges, only one policía waved us over. When we stopped, Mac went on the offensive by thanking the intimidating man-in-uniform complete with gun and nightstick, for stopping us, and telling him we were lost and needed directions out of the city. Mexicans are generally eager to be helpful, so the ploy worked, and the man was indeed helpful in telling us which road to take, after looking at our papers. After Mac’s “Muchas gracias!” we drove on. We were pleased to have all cash still in place from not having to pay a mordida, the proverbial Mexican bribe that we expected, as well as getting precise directions for maneuvering the octopus-like roadways.
We stopped the second night in Cholula, where a Catholic church was built on top of a pyramid, when it was thought that that high point was just a hill, near Puebla. We stayed at an out-of-the-way RV park that was not easy to find but was walled for security, grassy and green, and was worth the effort to locate it.
The next day, we drove past Puebla and onto a vast plateau, which was a straight stretch of highway at an elevation of 8,071 feet. We could see in the distance, the smoking mountain of Popocatepetl and the nearby mountain of the reclining maiden Iztaccíhuatl through country of flat, dry fields flanked by cactus.
“Do you know the story of these two mountains?” I asked Mac.
“I think I do,” he replied. “That legend was in one of the Mexican history books I read a few years ago. Remember the paintings of the virile warrior who is carrying a very curvy woman in his arms? You see them everywhere around Mexico.”
“Yeah, the handsome hunk, and the voluptuous maiden you drool over every time you see her?”
“I don’t drool, but yeah, that one. Well, that guy is Popocatepetl, and the maiden he is carrying is Princess Iztaccíhuatl, or as the Mexicans fondly refer to them as Popo and Izta”
“So, is he going to take her to bed or what?”
“No, silly, she’s dead.”
“Dead! He is carrying a dead woman? What happened?”
“Well, it seems that Popo and Izta fell madly in love and were going to be married. But her father the king decided they needed to fight the Aztecs, so Popo went off to fight them. In the meantime, a jealous man named Citlaltepetl, who wanted Izta for himself, told her that Popo had been killed in battle. Izta was so broken up that she cried until her heart stopped, and she laid down and died. When Popo came back and learned of his beloved’s death he was inconsolable. In his bereft state, he built this huge shrine for her and laid her atop it so that he could always see her. He sat down next to her with a smoking torch and never left her side. The dastardly Citlaltepetl was turned into the mountain now known as Pico de Orizaba so that as punishment he would have to witness the love of Popo and Izta forever.”
“Wow! So they turned into these mountains after all these years? That’s quite a story! That makes me sad, pissed off, and amazed all in one! How could such a thing happen?”
“It is legend, my love. The Mexicans love their legends.”
As we got closer to Esperanza, which was at 7,044 feet, where we stopped for petrol, with the amazing backdrop of Pico de Orizaba standing before us. Am I to look at this peak with scorn now? I couldn’t help but wonder, as Mac said, “So now, my dear, you see this man that was turned to stone, making this mountain peak Esperanza’s legacy.”
“You are such a romantic,” I told him. “It just looks like Mexico’s version of Mount Fuji only larger,” I said, as I took photo after photo.
Mac got out of the truck to see to the fueling, leaving me to reflect on the story he had just told me, and about the name “Esperanza,” which is “Hope” in Spanish. But I didn’t get a connection with that whole affair, of Popo, Izta, and Caca (my shortened name for the bastard Citlaltepetl), and the name of Esperanza, since Popo had lost all hope.
I could possibly see why the name “Hope” might have been given this town with this monumental mountain in full view that seemingly hovered in the sky from clouds that gathered toward the bottom making it look as if it floated. That might give a person hope if a person would pause to reflect on how minuscule we are as people, and how insignificant our problems really are. This was a majestic and magical protrusion, but the legend of who it was supposed to represent really sucked, and what it represented to me, after hearing the tale, was retribution. But whatever works for those who gaze upon such majesty.
It wouldn’t be long for me to see another meaning for calling this place “Hope” after a person drove up from the road we were soon to embark. They’d be saying, “Whew! Thanks to hope we made it up!” or, in our case going down, we’d mean, “We hope to hell we get down safely!”
Leaving the Pemex gas station, the straight stretch soon became a really windy one as we descended down into the mountainous terrain, and very soon, it was as if we had driven through a doorway.
The cactus and desert we had been driving through suddenly disappeared and was replaced with lush, tropical greens of ferns and trees from a rainforest-like setting. It was gobsmackingly beautiful on one side and on the other, the world seemed to drop off.
The Foggy Drive to Orizaba — J. Sharland Day
But all that, too, quickly disappeared as we drove into low-hanging clouds. The fog became so thick we could only see a few feet in front of us.
“I can’t see a “damned thing,” Mac would groan frequently, and then would suddenly yelp, “What the fuck!” with an accompaniment of a deep roaring grind. My heart rate multiplied and didn’t settle back to normal even when I realized the roaring was a semi-truck screaming past us on the inside lane and gearing down as it flew by.
“Son of a bitch!” I screamed, trying to let the bastard know he scared the crap out of me…as if he heard me, or cared.
This road must have been a gateway for the big cargo-carrying trucks because big rigs passed us frequently. And always as startlingly, since those behemoths seemed to come out of nowhere, without Mac being able to see them in his mirror to be forewarned. I began hearing, “Fuck!!” a lot.
Even worse, were the vehicles that would suddenly appear out of the fog directly in front of us like ghosts, because they had no tail lights. There were no early warning signs from red glows of tail lights or brake lights through the fog as we would approach the slower movers, making Mac have to slam on brakes to keep from rear-ending the overly cautious vehicles. As we passed one such knucklehead, we saw that the car was filled with a family of five or six. What the Hell were they thinking??
I had never seen Mac grip the steering wheel so tightly his knuckles were white, or see his jaw muscles move so constantly from grinding teeth hard enough it hurt, he whined, later.
But when the cloud bank would drift away in spots, I was faced, on my side, with the sheer drop off to a verdant valley and rolling hills dotted with white to colorful tiny villages. My breath couldn’t help but lurch with a loud squeal at the beauty of it, or the scare it brought on by feeling we were way too close to the edge. Not wanting Mac to look away from the road to see what was wrong, I would yell at him not to look, even though I was always gasping from it being so scary and breathtaking all in one; I didn’t want his attention to the road diverted for one second. Unfortunately, he missed out on seeing some really beautiful scenes, but I felt much safer.
After finally getting to the bottom and through the canyon cities of Orizaba and Córdoba to flatter roads in Veracruz state, we had to drive on the road-from-hell; dubbed so, because that road was in constant repair and should have been named “Try-to-Dodge-the-Pot-Holes.”
That night we had to stay in a Pemex gas station parking lot near La Venta, about an hour west of Villahermosa, sandwiched in with many other night-stayers who drove semis- — probably the same ones Mac had been cursing in the fog.
“It’s such a relief to finally stop for the night after that stressful and exhausting day of driving on that bitchin’ mountain road and then having to dodge the damned potholes,” Mac stated. Amen to that, I thought, sensing that Happy Hour was especially needed and appreciated that evening.